William Vollmann - Last Stories and Other Stories

Then it was evening at the hillside orchard, the guns faint and cozy far away like target practice while the couples got drunker and drunker. The American and the poet entertained each other by speaking of Vesna, who was not there. Enko grinned at Anesa’s sluttish face. After they slit the chicken’s throat, the girls bent over it and plucked it. Now the barbecue pit was smoking and white smoke came from cigarettes as a machine gun chittered while a shell sounded close but not perilous. The former mechanical engineer, darkhaired, slightly rotund, lit his cigarette while the blonde cut fresh parsley with the knife that had killed the chicken, singing gently to herself, and Enko pulled his pistol from the holster and showed it off to her and she smiled. The poet tried to flirt with Anesa. The American, a little drunk, having just learned how to recognize a KPV HMG antiaircraft gun, and not judging himself any better for the experience, wondered whether he were ready to die now, right now, if a shell came; and he forgot that he had asked himself this before. Lighting a piece of wood, a man scalded the mostly plucked chicken so that the girls could more easily remove the last pinfeathers. Smiling, Anesa said to the American: Ten dollars for a chicken; this is wartime! — And what he thought was that they had accepted him, and even his purpose; for he was not yet old, and so he did not understand that what often passes for toleration and even friendship is merely the easy indifference of people toward each other — although that understanding, if it is even accurate, may still somehow be less to the point than the illusion that we are all brothers and sisters. Just then, perhaps sensing that the American now judged himself nearly qualified to write about them all, the poet said, not without hostility: You can’t imagine how it was when they started shelling us from Mojmilo.

The next day only Enko drove the American around, because Amir had gone, so Enko stridently announced, to Bjelave on an errand for Bald Man. — I’ll be hoping for his safety, the American said, to which Enko replied, and he was right: What the fuck do you know about it?

Bald Man’s bar was full at two-thirty in the afternoon, the gold diamond-lines in the faded black marble nearly occluded by soldiers from the Special Forces with their black many-pocketed vests, and by militiamen and police with holstered Russian pistols, not to mention the many girls sitting and standing, all smoking cigarettes, the sunlight catching the bloody amber in their water glasses. Anesa was there, playing with her hair and tapping her foot to the loud music. Enko’s new blonde was of course also present; she crossed and uncrossed her legs. The American did not get introduced. He drank alone, quite peaceably. Beneath his windbreaker he kept on his bulletproof vest, which was heavy with sweat. None of the girls showed interest in him; he was not a handsome or prosperous American. He bought Anesa a drink, just to be kind. She blew him a kiss; she’d see him at Vesna’s. He bought a drink for a Special Forces man with a big boyish face who said: God help you with your story. — The waitress carried away the round steel tray, on which dirty glasses slammed like shells, and the music got louder, until he could scarcely distinguish the festive crackling of rifles in the distant sky. Gripping the blonde by her upper arm, Enko led her toward the stairs. She laid her head against his shoulder and then they disappeared. The American ordered another drink. For hard spirits the establishment offered only whiskey and cognac; the bartender used a shotglass for the measure, then poured into a water glass. Careful journalist that he was, the American wrote down this detail; and then he looked into all the faces, wondering how they differed from the faces of his interviewees who boiled tea on the landing where the snipers could not see, feeding the fire with cross-slats from a broken chair, their faces hard and dark.

Some men in camouflage stood outside exchanging Hitler salutes. They were drinking slivovitz or loža from the look of it, so they must have brought it with them; that lovely pure plum-fire taste nearly seemed to rise up in his nostrils as he watched. This made him crave another drink, so he had one.

At the next table, couples sat around a green bottle and a purple thermos, laughing, and at any instant a shell could come in and make them into what he had seen and smelled at the morgue that morning. He tried to smell loža again, but the smell of unrefrigerated corpses now lived in his nose. He wondered whether or not to write this down.

Enko, who had sensibly refused to enter the morgue, presently returned alone, militiaman to the heart of him, in his bandanna and sunglasses; he was more cold and harsh the longer the American knew him — the veriest personification of a gun — but now he stood on the stairs smiling.

Yes indeed, Bald Man had arrived, big and muscular, in camouflage pants, with the new Sig Sauer pistol in his web belt, and a walkie-talkie; his white T-shirt said: Armija Rep. BiH Policija. There was a blackhaired girl on either side of him, and out in the courtyard stood his fighters, as straight as the packs of American cigarettes on the glass shelf. He bought everybody in the bar a drink and then left. — He could tear your head off with his hands, said Enko admiringly.

I’d like to know more about him, said the American, opening his notebook.

I might be able to get you an interview, said Enko, as coyly as a high school girl at a dance.

What’s the bravest thing he ever did? asked the American, seeking to give pleasure with this question.

Getting out two wounded men by himself, under fire from two anti-machine guns at twenty to thirty yards, from No Man’s Land.

That’s very impressive.

He was one of the guys in the neighborhood sportsmen’s association before the war. People loved him. The only question people wondered was, when will he get elected as leader? He got us guns, machine guns. People came and said: I want to fight with you. Six hundred men would die for him.

You know him pretty well, I guess. What else do you want me to learn?

He loves the occasion when he has to catch snipers, but right now we’re not allowed to punish them, only exchange them. One time he was chasing a Serbian sniper for four hours. This Serb had killed ten of our guys. The SDS* paid him five hundred Deutschemarks per kill. Bald Man was alone; he had to climb a skyscraper, they wounded him, but the sniper surrendered.

Very heroic.

I told Bald Man how you said that all the Chetniks are murderers. That might help your case.

Thanks for thinking about me, Enko.

Some HOS* irregulars drove by and Enko gave them the Nazi salute. — Great fighters, he said.

Vesna had been drinking, as had he, so he said: Sweetheart, will you be my human shield?

If you don’t cut my throat afterward, darling! Oh, Enko, there you are—

The American turned. The poor poet was glaring at him, and he thought: Who am I, who have not suffered as he has, to threaten his one one-sided love? — And then he further thought, as if for the first time: I could be killed tomorrow as easily as he. More easily, in fact, since I’m at the frontline—

Accordingly, he wished to flirt with Vesna some more. Instead, he flirted with Dragica, who had no use for him (the night sky flushing with bursts of fire), after which he questioned the poet about Olga Ilic until the poet was mollified. A smiling fighter carefully wrote in the American’s notebook: MPs in BiH is the only MPs fronting the frontlines at all fronts. — Thank you, he said. Then Dragica and a girl named Aida were trying to educate him about the sounds of bullets, and Aida said, opening her pinkish-silver-painted fingernails (they still had cosmetics that autumn): Of course it’s different when a sniper shoots and when a pistol shoots, because when a sniper shoots it’s a longer hissing. — By then he had built up a certain opinion of himself, and had he stayed in Sarajevo for another two weeks, which his budget of course did not permit, it is possible that such aphorisms might have ceased to impress him, and he might even have thought: Woman, I wonder if you’ve ever been to the frontline, whereas I go almost every day and have learned how to watch Chetniks in an angled mirror so that both parties can see but the Chetniks cannot shoot. — I for my part hope that he never would have thought that way. — Through the taped window, following a shell-hiss, he saw the birth of a glow which nearly seemed comforting; it could have been the lamp of some student, perhaps Thea or Jasmina, who was preparing for her examinations before getting married; and the glow brightened; he could neither hear screams nor smell any smoke. Vesna’s guests fell silent, watching that fire, and then their talk sprang brightly up again. Dragica carried around the plate of emerald-fresh halvah. The American recorded the words of the haunted man who whispered what he had seen at night in Kovaci Graveyard; then Jasmina was confiding: I was afraid when a 120-millimeter grenade fell into my flat, but, thanks be to God, it went to the other side of the room; they fired it from the direction of the Studentski Dom… — And then Enko was informing the poet, practically shaking him: To hear them tell it, everything always went well for the Serbs, even in World War II. You know why? Because shame was never put into their fucking minds! God told their Prince Lazar: You have two options, either you will win today and be prosperous, or else you will die and go to heaven for a thousand years. Fuck their stinking Chetnik mothers! They never lose! Well, guess what? — The poet cringed away; then Vesna came, laid down her long fingers so gently on Enko’s hand, and said something which hushed him, and she turned him around and sat him down on the sofa between Aida and Jasmina, and the hatred had bled from his face, but his shoulders would not unlock. Then a Serbian girl named Branka was telling the American in a low and rapid voice: I think Slovenians were the big problem, at which her Croatian friend Olga said: I think we can blame the Croatians the most, because the Serbs did most of what they did out of fear of Croatians. — Vesna, sweating in her white top (with her pink mouth and short blonde hair, her narrow V-shaped dark eyebrows and blue-green eyes, she looked nothing like Olga Ilic), now said: The ones who decided to do this, it’s so sick, like pedophilism; someone was sitting in an office thinking about all the nasty things he could do to the people! The joke is that the Chetniks are copying old Yugoslav war movies. But these people who are shooting… well, as I’m growing older, I understand that religion is only manipulation and nothing else. — He thought he had never heard her so bitter. Meanwhile the poet stared down at her breasts. And then more people were telling the American their stories, each of which could have occupied his life in proper retelling. Perhaps in retrospect these nights at Vesna’s appeared more bright or even brilliant than they were; or it might have been that they were what they were by virtue of simple contrast (the darkness, the hissing of the shells). But he knew, he knew, that these people’s agony was not meaningless. And then came a shell, the women straining their faces at the window, then suddenly screaming, and after it exploded, very near, the building shaking, they screamed and screamed, and Vesna’s young throat was taut and sweaty.